Inside Canada’s top research hospital, more than 40 COVID-19 research projects are underway. Therapeutic trials are testing the impacts of antiviral drugs on patients, as diagnostic trials look to categorize risk factors. One piece of research, which the hospital is calling the “heroes trial,” is trying to figure out how to protect frontline health workers from becoming infected themselves while providing care.

But the University Health Network, based in Toronto, is now fearing layoffs among its researchers, after it shut down or suspended non-essential research and clinical trials roughly two weeks ago.

That decision resulted in research sponsors suspending their funding, says Dr. Bradly Wouters, UHN’s executive vice-president of science and research. Collectively, he said the health network is now preparing to lose a projected $6 million a month from the halted research and stalled clinical trials.

“That employs about 650 people, which we don’t have revenue for. So we’re working really hard now to see what we can do. We don’t want to lay these people off. They’re vital,” Wouters told iPolitics on Tuesday morning, in a telephone interview. “These are the same people that we would redeploy and help carry out all the clinical trials and clinical research that we’re doing now with COVID.”

And UHN is already facing down a future in which millions of dollars worth of their non-COVID research, some ongoing for months or years, has gone off-course. “We have 1,000 labs, 5,000 people,” he said. “Dollar and cents point of view, our annual research budget is about 450 million dollars — so you can do the math. We’re spending, what is it, eight million dollars a week or something like that? That’s all lost.”

“There will be a significant cost to think about how we restart,” he noted.

The few trials that have continued in the current situation include therapies being tested on cancer patients who’ve exhausted all their therapeutic options, where stopping could be unsafe for the patient.

Funding for research at UHN comes from three principal streams, according to Wouters — government grants (which are mostly federal, though some are provincial); philanthropy and charities; and money from industry. The industry funding is given on a per-patient basis, he said, and accounts for the $6 million the hospital is anticipating in revenue losses every month now that that clinical trials are paused or shut down.

And as the federal government rolls out supports for businesses and non-profits affected by the pandemic, the Toronto health network is pushing for research institutes within the research hospital sector to be specifically included in the eligibility framework for the 75 per cent federal wage subsidy program.

Wouters says his team additionally needs clarity on how they can, and can’t, use federal grant money while clinical trials and research are put on ice. “We expect them to allow us to continue to pay employees although the research is suspended. We certainly hope that’s going to be the case,” he said Tuesday. “It’s going to impact how much research can get done with those grants, but it will secure those individuals.”

The federal finance ministry declined on Tuesday to say whether research institutes would be specifically eligible for their wage subsidy, telling iPolitics more information would be “made available shortly.”

But Adrian Mota, associate vice-president of research programs for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, confirmed that CIHR had dubbed staff pay an eligible grant expense during the “exceptional” circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, even in cases where the trials or research were halted.

Wouters’ fears aren’t only about the immediate impacts, but whether the hospital can get its research back up right away once the pandemic subsides. “If we lose all this now, it also places us at risk of not ever capturing this back again. The sponsors of research can go elsewhere. Canada needs to find a way to be ready and to have this massive infrastructure, this massive research workforce that it has,” he said.

And concern about the implications of shuttered clinical trials isn’t limited to UHN. Dr. Ted Scott, vice president of research and chief innovation officer for Hamilton Health Sciences, told iPolitics on Tuesday afternoon that his institution as well was seeing a “dramatic” impact on clinical trials and research activity.

HHS, Scott reported, has paused most of their on-site, face-to-face research — initially to last three weeks, up to April 6, but he said that timeline is expected to be extended. Some work can continue, but like UHN, that mostly consists of cases where the trial is a patient’s only option, or a surrogate for their clinical care.

The hospital has meanwhile had approximately 10 COVID-19 projects proposed to them.

HHS doesn’t yet have exact figures for the financial losses the hospital might incur, but behind the scenes, staff are working out the specifics of their vulnerabilities. “We are very concerned,” Scott told iPolitics. He billed laying off research staff as a “last resort,” but also expressed worry about the possibility.

While, at this point, he doesn’t see any of the halted research projects as fully lost, Scott said they would definitely take “quite a bit of time” to return to full speed after the pandemic — and the longer they stayed on the back-burner, he says the situation would be “increasingly a concern” for the hospital.

Their primary worry right now, in his view, was retaining their workforce. If they could weather the current storm, Scott is predicting a surge of investment, in the next year and beyond, into research that could prepare the country for future pandemics — including research into vaccines and anti-viral treatments.

“We’ve been a little complacent, you know, since the last outbreak. We’ve had a few since then, but I think everyone’s paying attention now,” he said. As for requests of the government, Scott said he was “cautiously optimistic” that efforts by HealthCareCAN to extend the federal wage subsidy to cover medical researchers through COVID-19 would produce results. “That kind of lobbying is well underway,” Scott reported.

“I would just emphasize that our research hospitals in this province are huge contributors to vital health solutions, but also having economic impact in their own right. It is a very strategic area for us to consider.”